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As entertainment critic Roger
Ebert once said, "If you disagree with something I write, tell me so, argue
with me, correct me--but don't tell me to shut up. That's not the American way."

Everyone has your profile... the government, your bank, the credit rating agencies, the junk mailers, your actual or prospective employer, your friends, your enemies, all of them and more, knowing what you do, how much money you make, what you spend that money on, who you call, where you go, what you post, and everything else about you.

This reminds me of the movie scene with James Coburn in The President's Analyst, making a call from a pay phone, tracked by The Phone Company and the ubiquitous intelligence agencies hunting him down. Classic!

First, the government already knows almost everybody's basic information. And they already have huge biometric data bases. That particular horse has already exited the barn.

Second, there is some value in monitoring communications for terroristic activity. If bombings and having airplanes fly into tall populated buildings are something we want to avert, then we need to employ the most effective means we have to do this, and communication surveillance is one of a number of tools that when used in combination with all others can actually help in this regard.

But it’s also troubling when it means that my personal communications are being monitored. Even if it’s just by a computer program set up to spot key words.

For the time being, I’ve made my peace with this, but it is fragile. I hope this data gathering and communications surveillance is useful and produces results, but if they ever step on my doorstep I will very likely and very quickly change my feelings on this.

Your cryptic initial post was a reaction to the White house warrants (subpoenas?) to look at the communications of API et. al. reporters. And I agree, that was outrageous, indefensible, and Holder should be fired if not shot. Once again the current administration shows no regard or respect for the fundamental rights afforded by the US Constitution. In that respect they do show a Big Brother like attitude.

But with that reference (to Big Brother), I mistakenly assumed that your target was the latest revelations of data mining (data collecting? Only they know the difference) and telecommunication (date, time, from, and who to) monitoring of US citizens and foreign nationals by the NSA.

The NSA is really the best equivalent we have to Big Brother in the monitoring of citizenry sense.

Verizon is handing over so-called metadata, excerpts from millions of U.S. customer records, to the NSA under an order issued by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, according to a report in the British newspaper The Guardian. The report was confirmed Thursday by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Former NSA employee William Binney told The Associated Press that he estimates the agency collects records on 3 billion phone calls each day.

The NSA and FBI appear to be looking even wider under a clandestine program code-named "PRISM" that was revealed in stories posted late Thursday by The Washington Post and The Guardian.

PRISM gives the U.S. government access to email, documents, audio, video, photographs and other data belonging to foreigners on foreign soil who are under investigation, according to The Washington Post. The newspaper said it reviewed a confidential roster of companies and services participating in PRISM. The companies included AOL Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., Skype, YouTube and Paltalk.

The current stories are being presented as one big mess, but I don't think we can evaluate these stories unless we take each one by itself.

Media warrants - IMO No.

FISA warrants - IMO Overall a necessary evil, but it might have been an overreach in the case of Verizon. The FISA Court hopefully provides adequate restraint.

PRISM - IMO, a useful tool, could be abused, but in some form it's almost indispensable these days.

I don't think PRISM uses warrants. It is focused on foreign intelligence. And (back to my above post) that's where I'm divided. I think we should be monitoring foreign related communications for suspicious activity, because we all (I am making an assumption here, I guess) want to prevent terrorist events if we can, and this in combination with other tools is really useful in that regard. But personally I do feel a little uneasy with this kind of entity.

Yes. I guess we have too. Unless it is deemed a better course of action to give people bent on blowing us up the upper hand.

We have to have some sort of trade off between personal privacy and personal security. Just the way it is. In an utopian world we would be able to hold to ideals such as 100% perfect personal privacy at no cost to ourselves, but in the real world we live in, we are forced to cede a bit on that front.

Plus, both the FICA courts and PRISM have our elected representatives providing congressional oversight, but the secrecy aspects of the courts and the oversight is absolutely necessary. If you think about it for a while, you will see that there is no other way it could work.

BTW, I may be mistaken about PRISM not involving warrants. I think it is an ongoing national security program that's been operating for a while now with congressional oversight only. But I could be mistaken, maybe warrants are involved somehow.

Oh, THAT Big Brother. You know what gave me the creeps when I first heard the name? Homeland Security. It sounds too close to all the sci-fi stories I've read and the name alone conjured up wire-taps, monitoring, 1984 on and on. It sounds like something Orwell would have come up with.

Hiding out in Hong Kong, but just checked out from his hotel, Edward Snowden escapes the dragnet -- for now. He could very well end up in Iceland, where he can cool off his heels in a country that has never extradited anyone under political asylum.

"Yes, I could be rendered by the CIA. I could have people come after me. Or any of the third-party partners. They work closely with a number of other nations. Or they could pay off the Triads. Any of their agents or assets," he said.

"We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be."

I'm thinking he'll get caught. He doesn't appear to be too bright. I mean, he could have gone to Iceland before he made his big announcement. I don’t know why he might have thought that China would shield him.

If the CIA/NSA/FBI have all those powers (which no doubt they have), tracing a clueless fugitive should be easy. He’d better get aboard the non-stop Iceland express without delay, because once he’s indicted, Hong Kong could very well prevent him from leaving and begin to act on an inevitable extradition request.

If he does make it to Iceland, he’ll be able to poke his finger into the Obama administration’s eye without worry. Hope he likes whale meat. I tried it once. Ptui.

In a secret court in Washington, Yahoo’s top lawyers made their case. The government had sought help in spying on certain foreign users, without a warrant, and Yahoo had refused, saying the broad requests were unconstitutional.

The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law.

So Yahoo became part of the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism, according to leaked N.S.A. documents, as did seven other Internet companies.

Like almost all the actions of the secret court, which operates under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the details of its disagreement with Yahoo were never made public beyond a heavily redacted court order, one of the few public documents ever to emerge from the court. The name of the company had not been revealed until now.

Sherlocked by agman.

Okay, I guess it's time for me and my family and friends to encrypt our yahoo mail with 128-bit PGP. Have fun cooling off your supercomputers with that, NSA.

Yahoo said Tuesday it received between 12,000 and 13,000 requests for user data from U.S. law enforcement agencies over the last six months.

Apple said Monday it had received as many as 5,000 requests covering up to 10,000 user accounts since December 2012. Facebook received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests in the last half of 2012, targeting between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts. Over the same period, Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting as many as 32,000 customer accounts.

Advice for any terrorist: Go offline, toss the cellphone, snip the cards.

... the US has charged Snowden with theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence to an unauthorised person. The latter two charges are part of the US Espionage Act.

Legislators in Hong Kong responded by calling for mainland China to intervene in the case. Snowden, 29, who is reportedly in hiding in Hong Kong, was last seen on 10 June. He is understood to have made contact with human rights lawyers in anticipation of a legal action from the US.

His flight from US authorities, which want to charge him with espionage, appeared set to continue with an onward flight west from Moscow to Havana on Monday. From there, various reports indicated that he would try to get to either Caracas, or Quito.

Arriving in Moscow, Snowden disappeared again, leaving the aircraft without being spotted, but being pursued by the Ecuadorian ambassador, Patricio Chávez, amid speculation that he will fly to Quito on Monday, possibly via Cuba.

Snowden has asked for political asylum in Ecuador, the country that has also given shelter to the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, at its embassy in London.

In a statement on Sunday night, WikiLeaks, which has been providing legal and logistical help to Snowden in recent days, said: "He is bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisers from WikiLeaks."

Phil and other assorted characters will be looking for him there. Let's hope he can find the Clue Box because everyone else seems to be clueless.

Revelations that the US intelligence service National Security Agency (NSA) targeted the European Union and several European countries with its far-reaching spying activities have led to angry reactions from several senior EU and German politicians.

Information obtained by SPIEGEL shows that America's National Security Agency (NSA) not only conducted online surveillance of European citizens, but also appears to have specifically targeted buildings housing European Union institutions. The information appears in secret documents obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden that SPIEGEL has in part seen. A "top secret" 2010 document describes how the secret service attacked the EU's diplomatic representation in Washington.

The document suggests that in addition to installing bugs in the building in downtown Washington, DC, the European Union representation's computer network was also infiltrated. In this way, the Americans were able to access discussions in EU rooms as well as emails and internal documents on computers.

The attacks on EU institutions show yet another level in the broad scope of the NSA's spying activities.

Sherlocked by agman.

It has also been revealed that the British intelligence service GCHQ operates a similar program under the name Tempora with which global telephone and Internet connections are monitored.

It is really only an issue of how they use the information they gather. If the NSA is only using the information for threat assessment purposes, not sharing the information to intrude on or undermine diplomacy and so on -- attending to their mission and their mission only -- who cares. Certainly the people being spied upon have their secrets and concerns. We had a meeting, threw out 16 crackpot ideas, does the press really need to drag us through the muck exposing those 16 crackpot ideas that got pitched?

Germany has canceled a decades-old agreement on information-sharing with Britain and the United States, in the wake of controversy sparked by American leaker Edward Snowden's disclosures about mass surveillance programs.

Germany's Foreign Ministry announced the move Friday, saying it was effective immediately.

Pepe's summer 2013 sig blast

The row blew up after German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that classified leaks by Snowden detailed NSA bugging of European Union offices in Washington and New York, as well as an "electronic eavesdropping operation" that tapped into an EU building in Brussels.

"It's clear that that if the circumstances permit it we will gladly receive Snowden and will grant him asylum here in Nicaragua," Ortega said.

Meanwhile, an Icelandic lawmaker said Snowden would not get citizenship there, as he had requested, because Iceland's parliament refused to vote on an asylum proposal before ending its current session.

Cheese sticks with avocado salsa!Not like Ecuador, unless you like toasted guinea pig. Me? Not so much. Like kingfish's whale meat, but smaller.Plus, you can have Cocada Venezolana, a frozen coconut smoothie. With rum, of course. Rum makes everything better.

"Without the United States," he said, "we are better politically and democratically."Well, the man may have a point.

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

Really! RSA 128-bit with fully random prime number factors should do the job, but maybe we should upgrade to 256-bit which would take supercomputers ages (maybe longer than the age of this universe) to crack it.

I wouldn't be surprised if GCHQ et al already had some form of Quantum computers that render encryption less secure than we hope. After all public-key encryption was developed by the security services years before an academic team cracked it.

There's no way that any government of the United States was ever/is going to/will ever allow fully encrypted data comms to occur without the ability to intercept.

The internet is not secure nor will it ever be secure. It is absolutely naïve to think that it will ever be any different.

Truth be told, you have far more to worry about how the private sector is mining the data that is created by every phone call, text, tweet, online purchase that you make. This info is the a commodity that is traded from company to company with virtually no controls on the process.

And we all agree to it every time we sign a user licensing agreement or a credit card contract. The selling (and buying) of our cyber souls began long ago.

Snowden stood by his decision to leak a trove of secret NSA documents. He said: "I did what I believed right and began a campaign to correct this wrongdoing. I did not seek to enrich myself. I did not seek to sell US secrets. I did not partner with any foreign government to guarantee my safety. Instead, I took what I knew to the public, so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice.

"That moral decision to tell the public about spying that affects all of us has been costly, but it was the right thing to do and I have no regrets."

Snowden stood by his decision to leak a trove of secret NSA documents. He said: "I did what I believed right and began a campaign to correct this wrongdoing. I did not seek to enrich myself. I did not seek to sell US secrets. I did not partner with any foreign government to guarantee my safety. Instead, I took what I knew to the public, so what affects all of us can be discussed by all of us in the light of day, and I asked the world for justice.

"That moral decision to tell the public about spying that affects all of us has been costly, but it was the right thing to do and I have no regrets."

Well, it's reassuring that he tells us this about himself. Just as it's reassuring that Aaryn of BB15 tells us that she's not a racist, and that she was making Candice's bed when she accidently flipped it over. Just as it's reassuring that Kim Jung Un tells us that his people are living harmonious and self-fulfilling lives free from government oppression.

It's just so nice that people will go out of their way to tell us that all is well, and that they are heroes not lawbreakers, humanists not racists, the People's god not a fascist dictator.

I hope he can adjust to life in under an intolerant government such as in Russia, where if he commits the high crime of singing an anti-Putin song, let alone stealing state secrets and committing sabotage and treason, he can be disappeared.

They don't distinguish between treason and whistleblowing, if you break the law there, it's just breaking the law.

Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks...

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